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SPEEDVILLE — I was the kind of student who liked being the first person done with my times table worksheet.
Yeah, I know. I’m a monster.
There was something thrilling about working through the problems at break-neck speed, adrenaline pumping through your little third-grade body, that yellow No. 2 pencil getting slick in your hand as you try to remember what 7x8 equals.
For that reason, I feel like I understand the appeal of being a Rubik’s Cube solving champion, while simultaneously recognizing that it’s something completely beyond my realm of capability.
Some people are just made to line up the little 3x3x3 cube until each side is a solid color, including 20-year-old Netherland native, Mats Valk, who recently solved the RC in record time: 4.74 seconds. Pretty impressive seeing as there are a possible 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 configurations. Just watching the video made me anxious.
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Things I can do in under five seconds: Get up off the couch, open a bag of Lay’s sour cream ‘n’ onion potato chips and lint roll my sweater before I leave for work.
Fun fact: The world record holder in the very first International Rubik’s Championships held in 1982 solved it in an embarrassingly slow (pause for sarcasm) 19 seconds. Valk could ostensibly solve four cubes in that time.
